Abortion

In this discussion I would like to talk about abortion. It is always something I have felt very strong about and would argue to the ends of the earth on. I have always been Pro-Life, always. Ever since I became an Atheist, this topic keeps popping up in my head. Since it is something I have not wanted to confront, I have been pushing it to the back burner. Now that I have given it some thought I would like to tell you where I used to stand and where I stand now. When I was a Christian my thought process was "Abortion is Never the right choice unless the mother and child will both die." So even if the child were to survive and the mother dies, abortion is still not the right choice. Some might even consider that murder, I guess. To answer this question I'm sure someone will ask, Yes I would have and still would give up my life for my child. Well, now I'm sort of seeing things a bit different. If a female gets raped and gets pregnant from it, abortion is ok, (sad all the way around - for everyone). If a woman chooses to abort a baby due to the risk to the mothers life, Ok. If the baby will have a very very very difficult life and in turn make the parents have an equally difficult life, ok. To me abortion is a horrible thing, if someone wants to have an abortion just because oops I got preggo. That is horrible. If you don't want kids do everything in your power to NOT get pregnant. Simple as that. Life is a beautiful an precious thing, and yes I do believe it is special. Any and All comments are welcome :)

Replies to This Discussion

You do realise the number of parentless children scattered about the planet.

I'll also compare it to getting a dog from a kennel or from the Humane society. Getting dogs from a kennel encourages overpopulation. Let's adopt those already in the world, instead of creating more of them.

You don't know everyone's story, ok? There are circumstances that could cause you to make the adoption decision in the third trimester of your pregnancy when it is far too late to decide to have an abortion. I know this because it happened to me. I suddenly found myself in an entirely different situation when my husband walked out on me and his unborn child, and I did not want to put another underpriveleged child into our world. Adoption was my ONE AND ONLY CHOICE. I am sure I can't be the only person that this has happened to. I am sure ther are other circumstance that would cause you choose adoption after abortion is no longer a choice.

If you want people to adopt all the 'parentless children scattered about the planet', then take it up with the people waiting to adopt and the adoption agencies. The sad fact is that most people want a newborn who is unscarred by our harsh world. Foster children are very hard to place in permanent homes because they already have problems that most of us don't want to deal with. Sad, but true.

I did not choose adoption becaus I am ignorant, it was not irresponsible of me, and it certainly wasn't something I was planning from the onset of my prergnancy.

I maintain that your black and white picture of the world is very naive. The world is full of grey areas. I am glad for you that you have your own healthy children that you were able to breast feed for two years each, and that you never had any unexpected circumstances pop up in your life that change your situation. (At least I am assuming that you have children because you have so many opinions on how other people should handle pregnancies and how they should go about feeding their babies). That's awesome for you. But life is not like that for everyone. You can't just say we're all ignorant, sorry.

So you recognised your 'oopsy' moment in the third trimester... fine. But do realise that I was not pointing any finger at you specifically. As I stated many many times and you chose to ignore... at the time of making an abortion decision, one must assess one's ability to be a parent. You thought you could, but you based your decision upon outside considerations instead of your own ability in the matter.

That is very wrong IMO. An 'irresponsible' person who does not know that they are irresponsible is merely ignorant. A person who is irresponsible and KNOWS that they are, is the true irresponsible person.

We're talking abortion here, to be self aware that one should not birth allows one to decide to not birth... the rational solution. While an ignoramus goes around popping them out and giving them away. Within a given cultural context, ignorance is not a valid excuse.

No one here is disagreeing with abortion in the case where there is a medical justification, so we are talking about abortion of 'unwanted pregnancies'. To cut right to it we are talking about sex. Someone could be ignorant of the consequences of sex if they never got a decent sex education.

Almost without exception, one who knows how to copulate knows it can procreate.

The total published risk for contraceptives is not only due to the mechanical/chemical failure, it is also behavioural failure.

Neither of these two items are what's at stake here. What is at stake is that once one realises the problem, knowing oneself, knowledge, allows one to make an informed decision. NOT knowing oneself, not knowing one's own capacities, only allows for a dumb decision.

Oh! I see, okay, sorry. Some people consider "merciful" as what I described, sorry for generalizing your statement in such a way. Well, what you consider merciful is probably the same exceptions that I would make for abortion as-well. The only difference is that you may identify as pro-choice while I identify as pro-life. Does that make sense?

@ Zach - Yes, I think I understand. I assume you disagree that a woman should have the legal right to terminate her pregnancy during the first two trimesters if the reason is, she feels she is too young to be tied done with a baby. Is that correct?

I assume you feel it should be legal for a woman to have an abortion during the first two trimesters if she was raped (although I do recall reading somewhere on this thread that you had some sort of confusion with that). Am I correct on this point, or are you undecided?

I assume you feel it should be legal for a woman to have an abortion during the first two trimesters if the baby has a high risk for a horrible diesease? Am I correct?

You are correct. I believe it is her responsibility to deal with the risk that she took and not put it on the child via killing it. I am sort of undecided on rape though. I do not want her to have to live with the knowledge that her child is in an orphanage, or have that child live with her as a constant reminder of the rape, but the baby can not control who or how it was conceived and it is unfair to kill it on those grounds. So yes, I am very torn on that.

@ Zach - I am going to put my reply to your post on the very bottom of this thread, which as of now, would be page 44. It is a long post and I don't want to do it as a reply to your reply because it would take up too much room.